Abbygono

Lydia

Two sweet girls with big grins surround me; I’m sitting in my purple chair, just having an average day, nothing special. A Disney movie plays in the background and I ask Lydia a question and she says plan as day, “my name is not Lydia!” “Well what is it?” I ask. She responds quickly and I can’t make out what she said. After many attempts to pronounce her “name” I give up. I kindly tell her that I’m going to call her Lydia and that’s that. Sandy chimes in and says with her steady stutter that she’s right that’s not her name. Weeks pass and every once and a while the name thing comes up again. Confused and wanting to move on from the subject I say, "okay well, in our home her name is Lydia". Feeling a little mean I ask Lydie if that’s okay to call her Lydia, she nods with disappointment in her eyes. So I can’t leave it at that, I could see that I needed to dig deeper. Still not able to pronounce it I ask her when she had this name and why people called her Lydia. She tilted her head to the side and said at her dad Todd’s house, she had this name at her dad’s house and with shoulders raised she told me she didn’t know why people called her Lydia. A little bewildered I looked to Sandy for some answers; with a little disbelief I asked Sandy if this was true. She nods yes. Lydia was a good story teller so at times it was hard to know what was truth and what was a little bit of imagination and since her “name” made absolutely no since to me, I was skeptical. It sounded made up, could it have been another language, maybe but it seemed unlikely. It just sounded like gibberish. So I asked her who called her this name, she glanced at Sandy and pointed. “Oooohhh” I answer with my eyes wide and my chin lifting up, the light bulb turned on. Phew glad that was cleared up. At their dad’s house they were visited by a social worker periodically and she noted that they seemed to have a language between the two of them. A language only they could understand. She noted that it was very robotic sounding, but that the sisters responded to the sounds as if they were communicating. So I ask Lydia one more time to tell me her name, her special name that her sister called her when she was little.

Since then her special name pops in my head and it takes me a minute to remember what it is and what it means. Just a jumble of letters and then it hits me hard that it’s Lydia. I can say it now, knowing that it doesn’t have to make since, that it is what it is.

Abbygono.

Holding her like an infant in my arms I lean in close to her sweet face and whisper

~I love you Abbygono~